To answer this question, I decided to do more than just tell you about YouTube downloaders — I’m going to analyze them for you. By the time you finish reading this post, you’ll know all about the 5 options tested, and get a clear idea of which one you should be using.

Interface & usability: ClipConverter is an easy-to-use Web service for downloading and converting YouTube videos by pasting a URL. ClipConverter’s interface is nice to look at, and offers only the options you need to use at any given moment, a fact which makes it pleasantly uncluttered. After pasting your YouTube URL, choose a download quality, name your file, and choose which format you want to have it in. ClipConverter makes it very clear what the final file size is going to be. After conversion is done, ClipConverter will provide a download link for the video or audio.

Features: For most formats, ClipConverter gives you full control over quality of both audio and video, as well as the volume of your output, its aspect ratio, and its length. It’s very easy to download and convert only a section of the video. If you don’t know much about bitrates, you can leave these at default, or let ClipConverter detect the best settings automatically.

Speed: A high-definition (720p) MP4 video was ready to download after 1 minute 25 seconds. A 215 kbps AVI version of the same video was ready to download after an average of 4 minutes.

Annoyances: My AVI download kept downloading without sound, no matter what I did. This was not a problem with other formats. Clicking the “convert another video” after downloading one opens a pop-up ad in the background.

Extras: Also supports Dailymotion, Vimeo, Metacafe, Sevenload, SoundCloud, Veoh, MySpace, and MyVideo. Also available as an ad-free browser add-on for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Can also convert video files uploaded from your computer.

Interface & usability: KeepVid is a Web service that lets you easily download YouTube videos in a number of formats. There’s not much to KeepVid aside from pasting a URL and clicking on “Download”. KeepVid recognizes the video and presents a thumbnail, the video’s title, and the video’s length. You can’t change file name or adjust quality on KeepVid; all you can do is choose the format you want, right click the relevant link and choose “Save As..”. Note that KeepVid comes in two modes, Beta Off and Beta On. If Beta is off, you may need to enable Java in order to use the service. If you’d rather not, switch Beta to On, but be prepared for some slight bugs.

Features: Not many to speak of. The bookmarklet is an easy way to start a video download/conversion straight from YouTube, but other than that, there are no special features worth mentioning. This might be a plus if you’re looking for something really simple.

Available formats: FLV, MP4, 3GP, WEBM.

Speed: Download links for all formats are available immediately.

Annoyances: Default file name is a random number. Background pop-up ads open up on several occasion, and the ads in general are of the kind meant to confuse you into clicking them.

Extras: Supports a multitude of other services other than YouTube, including Dailymotion, CollegeHumor, eHow, Facebook, Metacafe, TED, TwitVid, and Vimeo, to name only a few. See a full list of formats here. Also available as a bookmarklet.

Interface & usability: Xenra sports a simple interface that nonetheless gives you much control over your final video or audio output. Simply paste your video URL in the box, and click Download to reveal more options. You will not get the option to choose your format, quality, and other settings, before you hit the “Start Conversion” button. The process is very easy, and pretty much anyone can follow it. The interface is clean, and surprisingly, doesn’t even include ads.

Features: Xenra is geared at creating audio files from YouTube videos, and as such, provides fine control over ID3 tags such as title, artist and album. You also get full control over volume and bitrate for both audio and video.

Interface & usability: Moving on from Web apps, Any Video Converter (AVC) is a desktop app for Windows or Mac that can handle all your YouTube downloading and converting needs. To download a YouTube video, copy the URL to your clipboard, and click the Download button in AVC. The program automatically pulls the URL from your clipboard, presenting a thumbnail, title and length for the video. You can then choose between several formats for download, and start downloading immediately. The interface is much richer than your average Web app, but it still easy enough to use without getting into too much trouble.

Features: AVC features a huge list of mobile devices for conversion purposes, so you can get the maximum possible video quality for your specific device. After downloading a video, you can also use the clip tool to create video segments, crop the video to your exact needs, and control colors and add effects. For every conversion, you can fine tune your video and audio quality, or simply use one the dozens of preset output options. AVC comes with a built-in video player to watch your videos, and you can watch videos while downloading and/or converting others.

Available formats: WEBM, MP4, 3GB for download, but can convert it to pretty much any video and audio format on Earth after download. For some reason, initial download for MP4 is only available in low quality, despite the video being available in 720p.

Speed: Can start downloading video immediately, but any format other than WEBM, MP4 and 3GP requires extra conversion.

Annoyances: When installing Any Video Converter, it will try to get you to install TuneUp Utilities. This will install by default, so make sure you uncheck this option if you’re not interested. The program will also nag you about the full version — Any Video Converter Ultimate — quite often.

Extras: As this is a desktop program, conversions of any kind will also work offline. AVC can also convert pretty much any video format you have on your computer.

Interface & usability: For some reason, YouTube downloaders and video converters have a tendency to be ugly and/or cluttered. Not so with Freemake. This slick piece of software is such a joy to use and look at, looks alone are a great reason to give it a try. To get started, copy a video URL to your clipboard and click the shiny blue “Paste URL” button. This will automatically detect the video, and open the format dialog. Once you choose your format and quality, videos will start downloading to the path of your choosing.

Features: When downloading or converting with Freemake, you can pause the process in the middle and resume it at a later time. You can also restrict the download speed, if you’re trying to save bandwidth. By logging into your social accounts via Freemake, it’s possible to download private videos people shared with you and that are not available publicly online. It’s also possible to enable “one-click download mode”, which saves you from having to set up quality and format every time.

Speed: After pasting a URL and choosing your settings, videos start downloading immediately. A high definition MP4 video took around 3 minutes to be available on my computer. An AVI took around 7 minutes to be available on my computer. Of course, this depends on your connection speed.

Extras: Freemake supports almost every video website out there, including Facebook, Flickr, Dailymotion, MyVideo, Vimeo, and LiveLeak. It also supports a large number of adult websites, and has special settings for videos from such sites, if that’s your thing.

East of use: A+

Overall: A+

Bottom Line

To sum things up, I’ll order the reviewed services from best to worst, and give you my final thoughts:

Freemake (the best)

ClipConvertr

Any Video Converter

KeepVid

Xenra (the worst)

If you download online videos and convert them on a daily or even weekly basis, your choice is crystal clear: you can’t really do any better than Freemake. If you only need to download a video once in a blue moon, and you don’t feel like cluttering your computer with yet another program, go for ClipConverter, or if you need WEBM, for KeepVid.

What is your favorite YouTube downloader out there? Should it have been included on this list? Tell us about it in the comments!

This may be more than 3 years old, but with CC becoming useless now-- since anything categorized under music in youtube is a no go-- it's time to search for something else.

And what do you know, freemake downloader still works. It's also still up-to-date. Last update was May this year. Only down side is if you decide to use it without the premium pack, you get 4mb/s max dl speed. So unless you're one of those people who go, "Ugh, why isn't this thingy downloading as fast as I transfer files to my flash drive?" Then go for something else, otherwise it's totally free.

Clip Converter always worked great for me. If you used the free version you had to put up with pop-up ads but they always opened in a separate window "behind" the conversion window and could be easily ignored.Converted scads of YouTubies to MP3 and MP4 quickly.

I use the past tense because as of this week, Oct 5, 2016, CC no longer works with any YouTube videos that contain music. They redirect you to the iTunes store to buy whatever music it is. Obviously someone got wise to the fact that lots of people were making lots of free MP3s and MP4s for their phones.

I will be checking out the comments here for more program suggestions since, as someone pointed out, this article is 3 years old.

I always use ClipConverter.cc . When I had a PC (before I realized Mac was better), I had FreeMake. I compared it to ClipConverter, and I couldn't believe I was convinced FreeMake wasn't trash. Always use ClipConverter. It's slow, but it's more reliable.

Thank you Yaara Lancet for the list. Just wanted to chip in my 2 cents as well :) I've been using http://www.flvto.com for nearly a year now. A really powerful youtube downloader. They have everything in store - online service, mac and win apps as well as a bunch of add-ons. I hope this will be helpful for your next reviews.

Hi, what for to write about the worst downloader if there are so many good ones on the net?
The matter is that you could have chosen 5 downloaders which will be same good and work well. And, on the contrary, you take just 5 different, maybe incomparable things, including bad ones and compare them. I do not see the point, sorry about that.

The site below (FreeStudio) contains an excellent YouTube downloader, plus it has audio and video tools for just about anything you could think of. On top of that it is free. If you don't want the entire package you can simply install only the tool(s) you need.

I have been using Any Video Converter free recommended by your for a long time. It is really powerful to download and converted YouTube videos. It is wise choice for you to recommend Any Video Converter to users who want to download online video and convert videos.

I use Internet Download Manager to download videos. For Chromium-based browsers, a free alternative that I would recommend is Youtube Options (https://spoi.com/software/yto/). This one can download videos, but the free one from Google web store can't; you can only use it to configure user interface at Youtube site

Here's a site I use and have had good success with. It's completely online and doesn't require downloading, but the only hang-up I can see so far is that it will only convert up to 1800 seconds (30 minutes).

I use from TastyApps since i got it (promotion or bundle) a couple of years ago and it works well on YouTube and other video sites. Saying that I think download less now than I used to do - things are there and do not need to fill my hard disk

I'm quite surprise all the services you compared are web based service. Somebody has to convert it for you on their machine. If they go out of business you are out of luck. Also, if they got hacked, you will get a virus. I use something call DownloadHelper, which is a firefox plugin, it is all done on your computer and don't depend on somebody else.

I use MacX YouTube Downloader and it's great!!! easy to use and doesn't bug you with ads or anything else. Also allows you to download 1080p to 240p videos. The software allows you to also download the video files to flv, webm, 3gp, or MP4. its a great free program if you find that the programs listed above don't work the bet for you.

As I started reading, I thought to myself, Freemake better be on here. :) I agree, I have used a myriad of youtube downloaders over the years. And none have worked as well or as fast as Freemake. Fantastic piece of software.